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Hey Riley, I changed this so now I don't owe you a beer!!
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I've been trying to get on to a comp for a few days now and haven't had any luck. It's making my brain all swirly with all the thoughts that I haven't been able to get out cause I can't write them down. Makes me realize how dependant I've grown on writing it all out in order to process it. It's like, if I don't write it then it hasn't happened. One day I'll think that I can take on the world and change the world in great ways, propel people out of their apathetic stupor and into lives that have meaning. Then I come to Sechelt and see the Extra Foods blot on the beautiful gravel pit and I'm reminded of the horrific selfish consumerism that hits us all. I didn't spend any money there, nor am I going to, but I did go clothes shopping yesterday and today. I'm trying not to be too crazy about it. I'm trying to at least make a vote with my dollar. I think what got me really down was going there with friends having all talked about stuff before and then to have them here in Sechelt, and on that very day of coming out of the inlet, they hit the giant box store that is the downfall of what could be a really cute community. It's like the people here don't care about where they live. It's an oppressed little hole as it is, and then to welcome in such horrific "convenience" that spells doom for many of the small retailers around with its giant parking lot, it just speaks of the apathy. Ah, the parking lot. Don't get me started on the fact that people around here live within a half hour walk to the village and they drive everywhere. Unbelievable. And this is an alternative kind of community. It just gets me. K. I think I'm done now. For now anyway. This is the problem, I had a tonne to say the other day and I couldn't and now I'm all dizzy in the lack of my own thoughts that used to exist. I didn't get them out so it's like I never thought them, except for the nagging in my soul that I had thought something of substance and now it's unfulfilled. The biggest part was stupid boy stuff from long ago. I had something tying that all in with what was going on in my heart and brain, but now I can't remember it. I just feel all very out of sorts all together and can't seem to get my bearings. up |
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Last night I walked into the village centre to get some Doritos. New Sweet Chili Doritos that Chris introduced me to. I walked out under the power lines and looked down the clearing. The sky was a deep black with cloud. Up on the hillside above the village is this nasty gravel pit that is a blight on the scenery usually. Tonight it was all dark with a few coloured lights around for the machinery still working into the night. The sky was eerie. It was dark with clouds and it should have been dark around that time anyway, but it seemed so much more ominous because it was cloud cover. Every now and then there was a slice of silver light coming over or under one of the clouds from the full moon that was blocked out of view. I spend too much time considering inter-personal relationships, which is ironic because generally speaking I really suck at them. I've been told that I'm a good friend but I don't know what that looks like. What makes me a good friend compared to others who are just meh friends. I listen, I don't judge, I try to stay in touch periodically without putting pressure to hear back from them. That all just seems to be what everyone should do. I guess when I look at it that way, there are only a few who do that for me. Not many get a hold of me when I'm not directly in their worlds. Where I was going with the opening of this is that I need to spend more time considering other aspects of life, not just relationships and my usual cynical rantings of the consequences of apathy in the world. Maybe some solutions to those consequences, or alternatives to apathy would be a good thing. Maybe some dreams of my own of what I want my life to look like, what impact I want to leave on those I come in contact with. I'm so blown away by a new friend of mine and how his vision, his passion, encompasses everything that he does in his life. It is his base reason for everything that he does. To have an underlying passion like that, that drives the momentum of your life is something that I can't fully grasp and must just stand back from it in awe and take it all in to learn from it. up |
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Happy Thanksgiving. Mum, Dad, and I are all back up at Malibu for Terri's Thanksgiving Extravaganza this weekend. Lots of food, great people, some canoeing, even the odd crazy prairie person to jump in the inlet when it's stinking cold. What I would have paid money to see...Terri drinking sparkling pear straight from the bottle as she was stressing about getting dinner made. She claims she went through 3 bottles getting dinner ready!!! She's my hero.
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Marcus and Holly got married today. I think that I had the best vantage point of the whole day. I got to focus on the two of them the whole day. It was like watching a love story unfold before my lens. It restored my hope in romance and love. I hate when it's all icky and over-dramatized and sappy and crap. This was the opportunity to watch two people get lost in each others eyes, to be so excited to have the chance to have this person in their life who thought that they were worth being with. It was great to watch them not be able to take their eyes off each other.
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Heidi and I just hung around here for the day. Oh, by the way, Heidi is visiting the Cabin here on Shawnigan Lake. We slept late, had some lunch, went for a canoe, sat and talked with Mum about life and Young Life and such. We talked a bit about immigrants, she is one after all, and immigration and different cultures. Mum and I had been listening to CBC at different times and this week they've had stuff on multi-culturalism and immigration. Terribly interesting. Odd how Canadians would never allow people to put down a culture in the school system, or in the general public, but if the immigrant is an American it's like they're fair game to poke fun at or make fun of. Can't make Chinese jokes, might offend someone...but those damn Americans and their backwards ways of believing whatever the mass media says or they're completely ignorant views on world politics, or their closest neighbours. Lump 'em all together. They're all the same anyway. You'd never get away with that with anyone else.
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We're packing Nana's today. It's madness. We had a bunch of help from the Hirschfield's in the morning. I kind of woke up late. I went to a hockey game with Wade and Jeff last night, and then went for dinner with Wade and Schaffer, and then hung out with Wade in the Zone till late, so I slept late, but not long. It was cool to wake up in the middle bedroom and have the sun pouring in. I opened the sliding glass door to the deck and it was such a sweet moment of feeling the appreciation of what a cool house it is. We've been so lucky to have had the opportunity to grow up in that house. It holds a lot of memories and I guess that my theories of places and things not being required for the memories to remain will be put to the test over the next year as we all move past having that amazing piece of property in our lives. I went with Dad and Rob once we got the flat deck loaded up and took some stuff to Nana's and then to Kilshaw's where the flat deck's battery died. By the time we got back to the house it was time to tackle some of the upstairs and trying to get out of the upstairs completely. We moved things to the appropriate rooms, such as crap going in the garbage, stuff going to Sally Ann, and valuable stuff going to auction. Did that for a bit, then Nen and I took one full trip all the way up to Nanaimo with stuff in their truck and the trailer. We unloaded it all into their downstairs...freaking heavy dressers upstairs. Then headed back to the cabin for the night. It was cool to just be the two of us in the truck together for a few hours. I have such an appreciation for who she is and what she is to my baby brother and how fabulous a person she really is. She's really quite amazing. I don't really know how to tell her that without making it all awkward between us. Maybe the Lord will open a door for me to be able to accurately express to her that I think she's super rad and that I love how she supports Ryan and what a terrific wife she is to him. I love that she's my sister-in-law and is a part of our family. Awww, mushy stuff. Wipe one single slow moving tear from your cheek. up |
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I had a really tough night last night. I talked to LeeAnne for a bit. It was odd timing. Good in that for the last few days everything has been reminding me of Japan. I feel like I'm in the same space as I was 6 months ago. I'll be doing something and I will be whisked away in my brain to some platform or street somewhere in Japan, existing in two planes at once - able to interact with my current surroundings but existing in my head with the full vision of my former surroundings. I don't want to sleep. I've been really tired lately, but when I try to go to sleep I just get doing things. It started with the computers about a week ago. I was trying to get them to talk to each other...as they should. No such luck. So that started me staying up really late. Well, I guess that I was before with all the wedding festivities and such, but those were supposed to be special event related late nights. Now I'm just up. It dawned on me last night through a series of events. I'm afraid to go to sleep again. I don't want to be alone in my thoughts because they've become so centered on Japan lately and it's all too painful so it makes me not want to sleep. My dreams are incredibly vivid and are alternate realities for me that are usually painful, so it's like I want to stay there once I'm in them and I don't want to wake up, but I don't want to go there to begin with. It's all been so crazy around here this whole week and I'm supposed to be leaving for Tacoma, but I feel like I haven't had two minutes to put together for myself. It takes a while to get to those two quality minutes and it's hard being here at Mum and Dad's with all the distractions and work and tv and them to make it so that I'm not left alone in my thoughts, until I go to bed, but now it's all gotten so far that it's all too intense and I don't want to go there, so I avoid sleep. We watched these videos tonight by the guy who wrote Velvet Elvis. Post-modern craziness. Well made. So there's one quick DVD that called Dust. He talks about being a disciple and what that meant in the Jewish world. So Jewish boys would memorize the torah. Then, when they were a bit older, they would go to a rabbi and try to get the rabbi to take them on as a disciple, as a follower of how that rabbi interpreted and lived out the scriptures as he understood them. To be accepted by a rabbi was like him telling the young man, "I see something in you and I think you've got it. You can do what I do". And the young man would do everything that the rabbi did and would essentially give his whole life, completely devoted to becoming just like his rabbi. So then you enter the New Testament and you've got the two sets of brother who Jesus goes to and tells them to follow Him, just like the rabbi would. He was essentially saying to them, "You've got what it takes, you can be like me". One crazy cool thought was that the disciples were probably very young men, some were out with their father, there's no telling how young they could be. They could have been teenagers, maybe 15 years old. Everyone depicts them old. That may not have been. Then you get Peter out in the boat in the storm and he asks Jesus to ask him to come out to Him. What an odd reaction. They're all freaked out and Peter says, hey Jesus, I want to walk on the water cause it's safer?? Not so much. Peter may have wanted Jesus to tell him, "Follow me, you've got what it takes to be like me, to do the things that I do". When he starts to sink it's that Peter doubts himself, not Jesus, in his abilities that God has given him to be like Jesus. It was a good mind shift. I've been all fuzzy lately because I haven't been able to write. Why won't I learn that when I don't get time to sit and really pound things out without thinking about where it's going or who's going to read it, then it all gets trapped up in my own brain and can't get out and so it's like some crazy molecules that are all trapped inside something and as they start to hit the sides of the barriers they start all wizzing around faster, bumping in to more walls until you've got this crazy little box of atomic energy that's just bout ready to blow the constraints and have all these molecular structures go flying about into the universe at extremely high velocities. I would think that there would be some physicist that could go into detail and have real names for things, and maybe this whole process has a name...but I'm going off Grade 11 Physics class here...that would be 1991, 15 years ago. Man, I'm old. What I'm trying to say is that I feel weird when I don't get a chance to deal with the little things and write each day. It gets all out of hand, and then I get odd and unable to cope with my reality. up |
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As per usual Michelle fashion, I am in a new place. I'm in Tacoma, staying with Karen. Last night I discovered an incredibly cheap ticket on the Clipper for today, so I decided that it was time to just go. The trip was nice and uneventful, which was different from the last time I was on the Clipper and the kids next to me all puked. It was calm and a beautiful night. I had noticed that the young marrieds that I was sharing a table with were probably Christians (said grace before eating their scone - not definitive, but a good chance) and decided part way through the journey that it was time to turn off my iPod, put down the Dostoyevesky and interact with them. Turns out that the girl, I believe her name is Karen, had taught for a school year in the Czech Republic. We talked quite a bit about living with the cultural differences daily. It was cool to hear how much of her experience was the same as mine and how the living situations are often alike when living abroad. Her husband, still don't know his name, had been pre-med and spent a year in India working in a missions hospital just North of Tamilaru (can't remember how to spell that, or the name of the place where he was). His experience was crazy. He had bucket showers everyday with no hot water, in the heat of India. He had a room at the hospital and stayed there his whole time. I really enjoyed talking with them and we even exchanged emails. The Body can really be something in the greater scope. I found it interesting that she had been to Prague and just this week I watched a video on Poland and the Czech Republic. She loved it there and would recommend the city, at least to visit if the Lord doesn't lead me there. We just kind of moved into a familiarity in our conversation as we started to drop Christian-ese throughout our conversation. We made it obvious where we stood in our faith (at least generally so) as we started to add things in here and there and based on the other's reaction become more comfortable in talking to each other like fellow sisters. I need to think more on this idea of the "secret language" of Christians and why we're more comfortable to talk like that with each other, dependant on the other person's reaction. There are definitely things that I say to some fellow Christians (usually the "good" Christians, those who don't push the envelope very much) that aren't part of my natural speech and I only use them for effect to show that person that I am the same as them, but because I don't generally look or act the part of one of them (ie. a "good" Christian, ie. I'm a "bad" Christian) then I have to use that speech to put myself on their same social level. "I am one of you" is essentially what I'm trying to say without coming right out and saying it. Does that make me any less authentic? I don't think so. It's still a part of me, but depending on who I'm talking to within my social ranking, I will talk to them differently. I talk different when I'm talking Wade versus Heidi F. Both are on equal footing, but I know that I won't offend him by dropping the F-bomb every now and then, whereas Heidi does not like to hear me say it. Does that make my interaction with either one of them any less valid because of the limits, or the change in speech for effect, that I put on my language use? I really don't think that it does. For good communication, when we talk we need to consider our audience. Everyone does this to a certain extent. Some people pay attention to it. Others may not have come to the developmental point (this goes for grown adults as well) of realizing that people may be different from themselves. They can't consider another person's reality, only their own. These would be people who may not communicate very effectively. Or maybe, they would. I think that if some woman freaks out at me and starts swearing up a storm, I'll understand her quite clearly. "So what I'm hearing is that you're frustrated". But it is still a valid point, I just happen to be getting off point a little bit, we speak differently to people considering their social status in comparison to ourselves. Now I'm at Karen's and we're settled into bed. I met up with her and some folks she was with at a restaurant downtown. The ambassador from Uganda was supposed to be there, but he bailed last minute. Long story. No one's fault, just a communication break down I think. It was a good learning experience for someone in how to effectively communicate a schedule (or the consequences resulting of a lack thereof). We'll get stuff figured out in what this will look like for a while. up |
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What a day. Karen and I went early to Seattle for a physio appointment that we didn't make it in time for. We then went to get the plane and took it to Lake Union only to have the ambassador not show up again. We took it back to Lake Washington and then headed to the U District for some lunch. We hit bad traffic so we took a fabulous little meander around the West side of Lake Washington to get to the Renton airfield to check on Bob's plane and to check in at the Boeing Employees Flying Association. There she ended up getting sucked into a really crappy meeting that solidified her resolve to leave the BEFA at the end of this year. By then I had gotten a hold of Noe so we headed back up to Bellevue to meet him for dinner. He and I took off and got lost in the area (not really, we knew where we were, just not where to go) and then found a Chinese place for dinner. Barnes & Noble was the next stop where we met Karen and all went our ways home. That's the synopsis of the day. Karen ended up just coming in and "interrupting" my writing. We talked till 3 in the morning. up |
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We spent the day doing stuff on Bob's plane (like spray painting the floats in kick high boots and a skirt) at the Renton field while waiting to see if we would hear from Lindsay about the Ambassador. Then went to New Song in Tacoma for church. We saw the Vancils and I got to talk to Jeff about being in transition as they are as well since he was let go from Young Life. We were both in the same position of being able to say, "It was really hard but it was the Lord's hand in it and I needed the kick in the pants". That's the essence of that. Karen dragged me up to the front where, lo and behold, it was Ryan Buskirk of Oregon YL fame who was in charge of getting people matched up with prayers. Mona and Kate were on their way out and got to get snagged to pray with me. I'm not going to go all into it cause I haven't slept much in days and it's wearing on me and I have to keep going like this for about 3 more days and I'm sure I'll regret it later, but shoganai. We hit on 2 things as the Lord led. The first was rejection that ran deep. Mona was given the image of a flower, a big one in my hands with all the large and small petals around it. It had turned all black because of the rejection and it has made me not what I was designed to be. The second was rebellion that stems from being controlled but I still don't know what the Lord means by that. We prayed about a lot of stuff, stuff I'm not going to go into here. I am a new creation. His blood has washed me clean and when I ask for forgiveness, He gives it freely. I need a daily reminder from Him that I am loved by Him, that I am forgiven by Him, that I am worthy to come to His feet because He has said that I could. I need the faith by the Holy Spirit that what we have cut off no longer has a hold on me. up |
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I went to my first Freedom class tonight at the Destiny City/New Song church. We broke through passivity and in particular how that is manifest in our class in specific in a few ways. Not wanting to restore broken relationships (family, the Lord, others), not initiating conversations with others,
We had to mark off all these boxes of things that ring true in our lives and I marked off a lot. He said to raise your hand if you marked at least one. Everyone did. Then he asked who had marked off five. Very few people did! I was shocked. I whispered to Karen, "There's a whole lot of people over there lying!" I marked off 29. 5? Pshaw. In thinking about it tonight though, there's a few things that were there that were under the banner of passivity. My thoughts are these. Passivity to me implies a sense of laziness and apathy. It's motionless, inert, inactive, dormant, sedentary, indolent. A few of those specific items we had to mark off as to whether we struggled with them or saw that we do them (may be no struggle, may be completely incorporated into our being) were things that I don't see the root problem for me as being passive. To me they're rooted in fear and a sense of unworthiness, and at the same time sometimes even superiority. Yes, in the same action I can feel both superior and unworthy. Anyway, we prayed against it and asked God to forgive us for all the ways we've been passive and I'm terribly glad for it because I quite tired of not feeling like my bold self. I have said for a long time now that I feel like I'm a shell of the woman I once was and I'm ready to go back to that. I have been bold in other, non-Godly, self-righteous ways, and I'm ready to be through with all that and to be the woman who can proclaim boldly the Truth into people's lives in such a way that will be loving (with the Spirits help), simple, straight-forward, and undisputable. I have cast this sin aside and I am a new creation. I was bought by the Blood and He says that I can call him Saviour and Father. I am forgiven and wiped clean. Gotta keep reminding myself of that to battle the lies that make their way into my brain. up |
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Finally got to meet the Ambassador tonight. He likes cows, a lot. He even visited cows every night when he was lonely living in Germany by himself. I was bold and got to ask him a question. "Most here are from America, I'm actually from Canada. What would you like the people of America and Canada to know about Uganda?" He spoke about community, the people come together and put others first before themselves. He spoke about the women of Uganda who stayed in the country during the genocidal regimes of Idi Amin and the other guy after him. (Ob-something or other). They were raped and tortured and they stayed to keep the country and culture going. They now hold many prominent positions in office. The Ugandan women are very strong and powerful. I sounded like an elementary school kid giving a report in front of the class right there. Who needs complex sentence structure anyway. up |
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I got home on the Clipper after waking at like 5 am. It was a decent ride and I spoke with the lady beside me for a bit. Mum picked me up at the Empress and we were off to the library to look for some stuff and then go searching for a mammogram place up on Fort. The lady was really nice. Because it's Hallowe'en, she was all dressed up in a renaissance fair type dress, very busty, very busty showy, perfect for a lady doing mammograms. So my boobs got all squishied between plates several times over. I won't go any further for the sake of the male readership except to say that it's not that bad. And to know that it's a baseline for any cancer screening for the present and the future then so be it. I liked her, she made me laugh, and she called me darling. I don�t know what it is about older women who call me darlin' with a friendly and non-condescending tone...I have a special place in my heart for them and I'll do pretty much anything they ask me to. Later, and after several other adventures and errands, it actually dawned on me that it was Hallowe'en (I might have been too preoccupied with the cleavage I was seeing up out of the renaissance dress for it to really sink in as to the reason for the renaissance dress in the first place). So seeing that it's Hallowe'en, I had to go to the Hirschey's because it's always the place we go on Hallowe'en...the reason of which is NEVER illegal or dangerous. We have Marc and Jon, and they're "The Voice Of Reason", so we never do anything that is outside the scope of reason (ie. anything dangerous or wrong). up |